In Romania in the early 1920s, every Dec. 10 was a day of student protest, its principal (and eventually satisfied) demand being: “Down with the Yids!” Angry at the disproportionate number of Jewish students, the anti-Semites forced them from the lecture halls and attacked them in the streets. Sometimes the Jews fought back, which the more numerous, better armed protesters only welcomed.

One Jew who didn’t raise his fists is the unnamed narrator of Mihail Sebastian’s 1934 novel, “For Two Thousand Years,” which proves to be remarkably pertinent to our time and place. The student maintains his calm as the blows rain down on him, mostly harmlessly, though his interior life is a riot of grief, regret and speculation. In notes that are elegiac and lyrical, the young man contemplates millenniums of Jewish history. He wonders what it means to be a 20th-century Jew, especially a Jew who’s also a patriotic Romanian. How does one bridge “the divide between the Danube and the ghetto”?

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Sebastian, born Iosif Hechter in 1907, was a writer deeply immersed in the fervent intellectual life of Romania in the interwar decades. “For Two Thousand Years” carries his introspective, often distressed, sometimes optimistic protagonist through this era up to 1934, as his country teetered on the brink between liberty and authoritarianism. Sebastian’s later diary, first published in English in 2000 as “Journal 1935-1944: The Fascist Years,” reports on which way the country fell. The author would survive the war, only to be killed in a traffic accident in 1945.

Trapped in the “poison vortex” at school, the student and his friends debate the Jewish past and future. Although he believes they’ve been crippled by the absence of a country they can call their own, he rejects Zionism as “a tragic stab at salvation rather than a natural return to the land.” Hoping to lay metaphorical and real foundations in the Romanian soil, he takes a degree as an architect and goes to work in the provinces, where he becomes embroiled in the conflict between traditional agrarians and industrial modernizers.

This is, in many ways, the same struggle that roils Romania and indeed the world today, the sides now defined as the local and the global or the nativist and the cosmopolitan. One of the young man’s two non-Jewish mentors believes in an intrinsic national character dependent on the Romanian heartland. The other is urban and European. They are bitterly opposed, in terms that will be uncomfortably familiar to contemporary readers.

After some time abroad, the architect returns to a deeply polarized Romania. The country’s minorities have been targeted by the regime, which has encouraged violence to which some intellectuals acquiesce. One of his friends agrees that the anti-Semitic rhetoric of the mobs is “idiotic,” but adds that “the point is to shake the country up a bit” — an idea we heard expressed last year during the election campaign in our own country.

What’s chilling about “For Two Thousand Years,” in this sensitive translation by Philip O Ceallaigh, is how its oppressive atmosphere foreshadows the rise of Romanian authoritarianism and the destruction of Romanian Jewry, even though it was published before the fascists came to power. Hundreds of thousands of Jews and other minorities would be killed and the Jewish presence in the country erased. “It is extremely difficult to follow the progressive hardening of enmity from one day to the next,” the narrator says. “Suddenly you find yourself surrounded on all sides, and have no idea how or when it happened.” This is the way fascism takes hold, regardless of how the sides are defined. I can’t help thinking that Mihail Sebastian is sending us a message across the generations.

Ken Kalfus’s most recent book is “Coup de Foudre: A Novella and Stories.”